Hactivists Claim Responsibility for Twitter Outage, but Twitter Says No

By CIOinsight |
Posted 06-22-2012

Microblogging social network Twitter suffered a debilitating denial-of-service attack June 21, beginning at 9:09 a.m. PST and rendering the site inaccessible for intermittent periods for several hours.

The site came back up at around 10:06 a.m. PST and then went down for various spans of time after that. An administrator posted the following message and kept it up on its status.twitter.com site: "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

eWEEK received a message from Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks at 1:30 p.m. PT, stating: "@TwitterComms: Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We'll provide updated information soon."

Hacktivists, However, Take Credit

During the outages, eWEEK was contacted via email by a person using the alias "Cosmo lol," who claimed to be a member of the UGNazi hacktivist group.

"Cosmo lol" took credit for taking down Twitter and, when asked why, emailed: "Just to show what we really are capable of."

When asked for proof of the deed, "Cosmo lol" emailed: "I can follow you on @CosmoTheGod and @UG for proof." There were lively discussions on those two Twitter threads immediately after the site came back into action.

After Twitter emailed eWEEK about the "cascaded bug" problem, "Cosmo lol" emailed eWEEK with this response: "They moved to multiple servers in the past couple hours trying to migrate our attack, there (sic) is no bug in there (sic) system.'"

This was supposed to be a big day for Twitter. The company announced that it plans to expand its "promoted tweets" ad platform to 50 countries by the end of the year.

"I'm extremely humbled by how quick and broadly Twitter has taken off and how we've done building something independent and timeless. This is a company that will last," The Hollywood Reporter quoted Twitter founder Jack Dorsey at a press conference in Cannes, France.